How to dominate at blogging

I was curious today what the “big guns” of Internet marketing tell their audience to do, in order to be successful. I’ve been accused of being an “Internet marketer” before, so I needed to know more about what I was supposedly peddling.

I visited their websites. I was inundated with pop-ups telling me to subscribe to get free content. Free content!

(Let’s ignore the fact that I was actually trying to read free content on their site when I was interrupted with their offer to receive MORE free content.) So I took the bait and subscribed. I didn’t even bother finishing whatever I was reading on their site, because I was hot on the trail of MORE!

Once I was signed up for these FREE mailing lists, I was “personally thanked” via autoresponder (which assumes I either don’t understand the word “personal” or what the “auto” in auto-responder means).

I skimmed each of the free books I received for signing up. I put my snark aside as I waded through, “GROW YOUR LIST LIKE ME” or “I MADE TEN BILLION DOLLARS WITH AFFILIATE MARKETING AND YOU CAN TOO!”.

I learned exactly what to do to have an online empire like they do. These stories were all told quite humbly (with lots of name dropping and accomplishments listed).

I think Internet marketing has taken the place of “Get rich quick” travelling seminars.

Remember Tom Cruise in Magnolia? Respect… The Cock. It’s a derivation of that, except with ebooks, videos and infographics. Less overhead! No need to invest in those costly but tiny microphones that attach to your head!

The rub is that these people actually do well. They have huge stats, massive mailing lists, and are easily making a “decent” (I could have probably chosen a more appropriate word) living. They have captive audiences, eager to eat up what they’re peddling. Someone out there (a lot of someone’s in fact) eat this up like pudding—universally recognized by Internet marketers as the most widely consumed and enjoyed treat.

To follow in their enormous footsteps, since I’m an Internet marketer and growth hacker too, I am going to share what I’ve learned about how to be successful on the Internet, because I personally want you to to be successful, too.

Write lots of guest posts. Worry about where they’ll be posted later. Worry about what you’ll actually write later, too. Just keep “write more guest posts” on your to-do list.

Break posts up with headings, bullets, photos. This rewards the people who don’t actually care about what you write with distractions and annoys the people who just want to read what you have to say.

Don’t write more than 500 words per article. See the above point about rewarding people who don’t care about what you’ve wrote.

Interact with every commenter. Do this until you’re too big to deal with those annoying peons who write comments. This also applies to email: reply to everyone who writes to you until you’re too big too listen or care what they have to say.

Affiliate programs. Join ALL OF THEM and promote them tirelessly. The universe rewards those who don’t do actual work but meticulously promote someone else’s work instead.

Write incredible content. You don’t need to learn how to write well or even have valuable expertise in a subject area you’ve spent decades working in or researching. Just copy popular blog posts and change up the words a little, telling a slightly different story. Write about whatever’s popular and just embed tweets or quote others to fill in the gaps. Notice only what other popular bloggers notice. The Internet is too big for most plagiarists to get caught. Oh, and here’s another blogging must-do: Make sure every blog post starts with, “How to…” and then lists a number. Examples: “How to crush your competition with 7 simple steps” or “How to do open-heart surgery over Facebook in 3 steps” or “How to seem like you’re offering value to your audience but really you’re just selling at them… in 16 steps”.

SEO is important. Tell your web developer you want ALL OF THE SEO. Tell them to install SEO immediately and if they refuse or tell you that doesn’t make sense, fire them and hire a developer that just says yes to everything you say. Dancing hamsters are back en vogue.

Create a Facebook fan page for your blog. Then create a separate Twitter account, Google+ page and Pinterest business page. Promote them on your blog and add at least 10 links to social sharing before, after and to the side of each blog post. The more social media buttons to share content on your site, the more people share. So fill ‘er up! Then promote each social network on all the other social networks. Because it’s easier to get likes/follows than it is to get readers.

Dominate conversions to gain passive income. If this doesn’t even make sense, stop trying to make sense of it. Just do it. Dominate.

The world is a richer and more fulfilling place when all the sleazy salespeople are thinly masked as content creators.

Let’s all win at blogging together!

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